Article:
A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
by R.S. Hadji
(originally published in Iniquities Magazine, Autumn 1991)

Some sevenscore years ago, in the bright morning of the Machine Age, Ralph Waldo Emerson witnessed the Peaceable Kingdom fall before Mammon's steely jaws with these rueful words: "Things are in the saddle, and ride Mankind."

So they do, and so do we, in the twilight of the millennium, find ourselves greed-ridden, glitz-ridden and waste-ridden up to our eyeballs. Yet we fail to see. Not so Skipp & Spector, Bad Boys of the New Horror now come to maturity, their vision clear and uncompromising in THE BRIDGE, a dirge to eco-death that delivers a wake-up call to the sleepwalkers. Pay attention. Or die.

Rockin' hard and talkin' hard, they avoid the usual clichés associated with disaster fiction, to introduce a uniquely dangerous serpent in Paradise -- Pennsylvania, that is, a nice place to live and work, just downstream from Black Bridge, " a sin-eater for the Industrial Revolution... a toxic ground zero, and industrial primordial stew." (p.8). Womb of a new life force, here referred to as Overmind, the child come to devour its parents:

"born of poison, raised in poison, claiming all form as its own, awakening its seed in everything it touched." (p. 172).

THE BRIDGE spans the passing of a single day, the last, in which a world of comforts becomes a world of pain. "And not one of them saw it coming." (p.21). Overmind is born of anger, too, the passionate outrage of its authors pulsing through and between the lines. Witness this scathing indictment of our society:

"...the greedy insatiable eating machine: shoveling resources into one end, shitting poison out the other...a parade of corporate criminals burrowing through civilization like flies through offal. Raping their heritage. Devouring their young. Breeding swarms of dull-eyed mall dwellers..." (p.166)

THE BRIDGE is as much a 90's satire on the conspicuous consumption of the 80's as American Psycho, albeit with more cheek than chic. But it, too, is swarming with stuff, the artifacts and detritus emblematic of the blandness and blindness of contemporary culture, soon to awaken to the touch of the Toxic God:

"...skittering little forms in concrete and plaster and wood, a frenzied swoon of warped animate copulating kitsch. It was a lawn ornament orgy by Bosch: leprechauns in motion, mounting fleeced, bleeting plywood lambs; lawn jockeys sploshing through the mud, riding pink flamingos from behind..." (p.260)

Overmind is the ultimate consumer, the perfect end product of consumerism: pure appetite, consuming the consumers and consummating their desires in the ascendancy of trash. The great chain of being is broken, animal/vegetable/mineral all emancipated, all contaminated, all ambient and sentient. Hunting humans in the "Hell that Mankind had created on Earth." (p.235). So like life, and anti-life, THE BRIDGE is sprawling, messy, humongous, and volatile. It embraces, but barely contains, a knowing absurdity appropriate to the scenario, often erupting in bitter ironies. As when Dietz, the former HazMat worker turned tocix avenger seeks out local "head of industry" - and mounts them on the bristling spines of his truck.

The humor here is hard, Swiftian in its savagery, finding its voice in the manic laughter of the Overmind-spawn. The giggle and grin like characters out of The Vault of Horror, or Two Thousand Maniacs. For those washed in the Blood of the New Earth have seen and tasted the joke, and know that the fun is infectious:

"...it wasn't until the tumors stared back that the full humor of his situation struck him..." (p.208)

The manic energies loosed surge over the reader, a rush to Judgment inducing guilty exhilaration. In truth, the authors themselves are, at times, bedazzled by their own Bonfire of the Vanities. But this isn't just nihilist graffit, and the agenda is not "fuck everyone and everything" (p.341). They have a message to deliver and it rides the storm.

At a fundamental level, THE BRIDGE is designed as agitprop, to alarm and arouse readers to the environmentally toxic excretions of the past, and present, now lowering dangerously over our future. Skipp and Spector are employing the very potential of the medium to disturb, to open its readers, in order to run their message through the breach:

"The idea is to ground the paranormal, to give it credibility, to make it organic and upsetting. We're trying to cut through the somnambulism." (Craig Spector, Midnight Graffiti, June 1989)

While the authors have little truck with ideologies or 'isms', they do respect the potency of myth and symbol, and these constitute an active presence in the images and incidents of THE BRIDGE. Overmind's ascendancy challenges, and subverts, the new faiths of science and 'magick': the mechanisms of the former failing utterly in the suspension of natural laws, the sacred circle of the latter providing but a brief and fragile shelter from the storm. The white witch Micki discovers too late that "you can't run from the devil in your own back pocket"; the toxicity that is our birthright. The "pillar of fire" that marks Overmind's godhead clearly recalls those Biblical cities of the plain, already corrupted. God's grace, and wrath, were long absent from Paradise before its Fall. Yet that terrible reckoning is received as "an altogether religious experience" (p.335). A mystery, as is transubstantiation, significantly bridging the gulf between life and death. And death-in-life:

"Overmind performed the miraculous rites...Take this and eat, for this is my body. Making a new covenant. For the new world." (p.301)

Thus the figure-8, symbol of eternity, is Overmind's signature, the taint of its toxicity on all creation. Condemned to know the great chain of being, to know the Fall. No freedom from the responsibility of godhead. What can prevail, when all from is inverted, perverted? We are so small, we break so easily...

"Horror was love, in this Brave New Hell: the capacity for caring , and for sharing pain. To find oneself both in love and in Hellwas more than torture, worse than madness. It was tantamount to sin." (p.325)

Nonetheless Dietz, the Toxic Avenger, endures and retains his humanity by asserting free will. He is Overmind's "fallen angel", seeking out his doomed lover and absorbing her fragments in an act of hideous beauty. Transubstantiation. An act of faith. As THE BRIDGE is an act of faith on the part of its authors, a parable nestled in a paradox. Bearing its sting in the tail, like a wasp. A lesson to be learned, while choices remain. But if this goes on...

"If there is any hope for the future, it must surely rest upon the ability to stare unflinchingly into the heart of darkness. Then set our sights on a better place. And prepare ourselves. To go too far. (Skipp & Spector, Book of the Dead, p.14)


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